Municipal infrastructure gap widens

Scott Simpson, Vancouver Sun10.26.2012

Across Canada, cities are failing to meet the demand for new and modernized municipal infrastructure, including sewers, water mains, and roads. One way to manage the shortfall is making better use of existing infrastructure.

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Give or take a few tens of billions of dollars, Canada’s municipal infrastructure deficit is somewhere in the vicinity of $200 billion.

Roads, bridges, water pipes, sewer lines, schools, hospitals — the list of aging systems and facilities in need of cash is almost endless and, for taxpayers, it represents a seemingly insurmountable wall of higher taxes and government debt.

That’s how things stand in 2012, according to a study of 123 municipalities released in September by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and some industry partner organizations. The study said more than half of municipal roads are “falling apart” and that 25 per cent carry more traffic than they were designed to handle. Between 15 and 30 per cent of water and waste water systems need upgrades or replacement.

But what about 2035, when many of the systems that provide or deliver vital services are a couple of decades older? How can cities in this country, and around the world, keep pace with demand for policing, education, communications and other essential services without making urban life prohibitively expensive?

“There are really a lot of things at play here, coming together at the same time,” said John Longbottom, Canada strategy leader for IBM’s Smarter Cities program.

Smarter Cities is made up of computer programs that provide new or more efficient ways to manage information — whether it’s retrieving police records, predicting traffic jams or reducing the likelihood of a sewer backup in an old part of town.

There is more computing power associated with the ignition of a new model car than was available to support the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, Longbottom noted.

Computing power is seen as key to keeping civil infrastructure and services running at optimal levels. Predicting which area is more prone to violent crime or to traffic gridlock may help a police department or a transit service operator decide where best to deploy scarce resources.

“How do I make sure the dollars that a city or an associated provincial or federal government spends are going to the right places and doing the right things?” Longbottom said. “If I can get better information, if I can get more data and drive new insight, I can apply that insight towards those systems that ultimately will help me better shape the outcomes, which will help me deal more effectively with the challenges and issues that I have defined at a business level (for the local government).

“I don’t want to have to go to a piece of road, and because I’ve got five or six different assets with different asset life and different conditions (such as water, sewer, gas and communications lines), and tear the road up five times.”

Finding better ways to use infrastructure, rather than non-stop investment in new facilities and services, is better for taxpayers, Longbottom said.

“We need better strategies to organize the scarce capital we have because we are never going to get rid of the deficit in its entirety. We need to do a better job of getting more out of what we have,” Longbottom said.

One recent example where technology saved a city money is South Bend, Ind., where a combined sewage/stormwater outflow system would back up during extreme storms, leading to flooding in homes as toilets and storm drains overflowed.

“By using data, in most cases data that they already had, and predictive models, we were able to take the amount of overflow incidents from 27 per year on average down to one,” Longbottom said.

Municipal infrastructure gap widens

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